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INCOLN 

AN ORATION 


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A B R. A H A M 

LINCOLN. 


BY EDWAR.D A. SUMNER.. 
OF THE NEW Y O R. K BAR.. 



A rv Oration 


Delivered before the Men’s League of 
The Broadway Ta.berna.cle Church, 


of New York City, 

* ,v r » r « n i ^ * *> F 


February JOtb, 1902, 



















E>51 


8 




THE LIBRARY wF 
CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Receive® 

MAY. 5 1902 


COPVRIftHT ENTRY 

IPj 9 V 
CLASS Ct/XXC. No. 

i f ** 

COPY B. 


“I have always tried to pluck up a 
thistle and plant a flower, wherever 
I thought a. flower would grow.” 

— Lincoln. 














iS the visitor leans upon the gallery 

A | balustrade of the National Library 
I at Washington, that monument of 
beauty, that gift to their country 
of the best that is in American 
architecture and genius and art, 
he finds imprinted upon its walls 
words befitting the chaste splen¬ 
dor of their surroundings. And first across from 
his eye is this “Hither repairing other stars in 
their golden urns draw light.’’ 



A sentiment we may happily make our own 
whenever we come together once in the year up¬ 
on the time named in our laws, and setting aside 
the care and the rush and the turmoil and the 
distraction of the life of the nation and of this, 
its teeming metropolis, may again draw hope and 
faith and inspiration and pride and light into the 
golden urns of our citizenship from that great 
star of the nation’s dark and troublesome and 
Homeric days, ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

If some measure of this be taken to ourselves 
in the brief time of this evening; if any heart 
in this audience be strengthened in his personal 
life, in his struggle for right citizenship and in a 
splendid and abiding belief in the working out of 
a destiny for this land of ours, for ourselves and 
our children after us, a destiny whose greatness it 
has never yet been vouchsafed mortal eye to fore¬ 
see, then your speaker will count the whole ob¬ 
ject of this address accomplished. 


The story of this life is a thrice told tale, but 
it is one where age cannot wither or custom 
stale its infinite variety. This is the more true 
if the first impressions are the vivid ones of the 
dawn of boyhood. Which happened to be my own 
good fortune. It was fully forty years ago. The 
September stars had begun to twinkle that night 
upon the then western frontier town on the Wis¬ 
consin banks of the rolling Mississippi. The 
evening breezes fragrant and cool from upland 
bluff and prairie stretch were wafting in with 
that soft and velvet touch so characteristic of 
those early days of the plateaus of the new North¬ 
west. Soon they bore the sound of fife and drum 
and then the tread of marching feet. Along the 
street swung a line of a hundred men, the flag 
at their head, and each bore his torch and wore 
the glazed cap and cape. There was a halt at my 
father’s gate. He joined them. And they swung 
away into the darkness, singing in mighty unison 


3 





to their rythmic tread one of the great songs of 
the north land : 

“John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the 
grave, 

But his soul goes marching on." 

And each shook aloft his torch as men know¬ 
ing they were about to look upon the throes of the 
young Republic, for life or for death. 

These were the Lincoln Wide Awakes. And 
the campaign was for the first election to the 
Presidency of the tall rail splitter of Ilinois. 

No truer word was ever believed or uttered than 
that the Lord of Hosts, who holds in his hands the 
nations of men, had from the first chosen and 
trained and ordained this man to lead this people 
through the terror and the struggle and the blood 
and the cries and the tears, with the smoke of a 
great cloud by day and an exceeding pillar of fire 
by night, yea, through the very valley of the 
Shadow of Death itself, of four years of Civil 
War. 

As his fellow citizens gathered about him in 
this never to be forgotten struggle for the Presi¬ 
dency, they found a man chosen to command, tall 
above his fellows even as Saul of ancient and 
kingly days, awkward at the first in appearance, 
but gifted with a judgment unerring, a power 
of argument and logic supreme, a very simplicity 
and pathos itself of eloquence; with the tender 
heart of a woman and the lion heart of a man, 
and fitted for the fiery ordeal before him as none 
could have been save by the life of toil and pri¬ 
vation and hardship and poverty and rigor that 
had been his. Glance briefly at the moulding of 
it and note the perfect tempering of the instru¬ 
ment through the fires it passed, for the work it 
had to do in the hands of a great people. 

The first test of this nature of ours is by deep 
privation and sorrow; and so it was with him. 

The family had moved in the year 1818 from the 
wilderness of the present State of Kentucky to the 
wilderness of the present State of Indiana. Trial 
and poverty and a hand to hand fight with nature 
for a foothold was its daily lot. 

Then sickness came and for weeks the mother, 
the loving and tender and caring for mother, 
whose sweet and womanly presence in that far off 
cabin of the forest had been the whole light of 
this boy’s life, lay wasting with mortal sickness. 
And one night death came and she answered the 
call. In a rough box he helped to hew they low¬ 
ered her worn form into the arms of mother earth. 
And ashes had returned to ashes and dust to dust 


4 


and the spirit had gone to the Maker who gave it. 
There was a little burial service, with a few far- 
gathered frontier friends about. Simple words of 
hope and of life immortal were spoken by the 
travel stained and circuit riding man of God. 
While at the grave stood the stricken father and 
these three little ones. Left alone. Youngest and 
smallest of them all, Abraham peered around the 
rough wooden headstone, looking at him who 
spoke and prayed, through eyes tear-stained and 
filled for the first time with the great and un¬ 
speakable mystery of death, and from which was 
never thereafter to leave that look of mysticism 
and sorrow which marked the face of ABRA¬ 
HAM LINCOLN like the face of an Isaiah, great 
prophet of his people in days of old. 

And so Lincoln grew into older boyhood and 
young manhood in the forest home close to the 
very heart of nature herself. And there the thirst 
for knowledge came full upon him. The stronger 
and the deeper that ihere were no wells of the 
printed books from which he might drink. In his 
father’s cabin were but three of these. The Bible, 
Aesop’s Fables and Pilgrim’s Progress. And so 
it came to pass that this boy who was a master 
in woodcraft, who knew the ways of the bird and 
of the beast, who had learned the lessons of the 
woodland and the forest and the stream and the 
hill, of the moss upon the tree and of the latter 
and of the early rains, of the promise of the bow 
in the cloud, of the harvest and seed time and of 
all the sweet teachings of nature, found first of 
the books of men three of their rarest classics 
and in one of them the very voices of God. For¬ 
tunate indeed was that boy and fortunate the na¬ 
tion over whose strange and wonderful destiny he 
was in latter years to he called to preside. 

Young Lincoln read and reread these hooks un¬ 
til he knew two of them by heart and until all 
had become wrought into the very fibre of his 
nature. They formed his beliefs and became his 
literary taste. These never forsook him. Out of 
the Fables came that fondness for and aptness in 
story and illustration which so characterized his 
whole career. Out of Pilgrim’s Progress and the 
Bible came that masterful, that simple, that clear 
cut and exquisite Anglo-Saxon diction and style 
which was to rank him as one of the first of the 
orators of the world and which reached its acme 
and perfect flower in that speech upon the battle¬ 
field of Gettysburg. One of the few that was not 
born to ever die. 


What the meagre home could not give him in 
books the boy walked miles to borrow from kind¬ 
ly neighbors, who were reckoned those days liter¬ 
ally by miles. Thus he had from neighbor Craw¬ 
ford and brought home in the bosom of his hunt¬ 
ing shirt and read a Life of Washington, by 
Weems. That evening the crude and homemade 
tallow dip burned down and out. The boy tucked 
the precious book into the log wall beside him. 
With the morning light he reached for it. T he 
night’s storm had blistered and soaked its every 
page. But only to bring straight to the fore the 
boy’s honor and determination, great qualities in 
which this boy was father to the man. For three 
days he bound himself to that neighbor a bonds¬ 
man at the pulling of cornstalks, until he paid for 
and owned the half ruined, but still eagerly stud¬ 
ied volume. No story of Lincoln is new. But 
wherever his life is recounted this one should 
be told as a memorial of him. 

To such books, read anyhow and anywhere so 
only he could read, read between blow of axe and 
swing of maul at day, and by back log fire into the 
far night, were added Cooper’s Leather Stocking 
Tales and the priceless gems of Burns and the 
Bard of Avon. The former, in the judgment of 
Lincoln’s mature years, only little less great than 
the matchless genius of the latter. No wonder at 
this estimate. For the Scotch poet knew the 
human heart as few ever did and the American 
martyr sounded all the depths of its pathos, its suf¬ 
fering and its sorrow close to the people he loved 
and led through those years of terror and death. 

And now there came a turn in the tide of this 
boy’s life, strange, unlooked for, uncounted on, 
that bore him to the sight and the hearing of a 
new thing; a thing that seared his high soul for¬ 
ever toward it; that lifted him up as the leader of 
his Nation against it; that overthrew it; that 
made him the Emancipator; that martyred him; 
that gave him high place among the Immortals 
forever. 

Storekeeper Gentry must send a cargo of pro¬ 
duce to New Orleans by flat boat; that lumbering, 
scow-like, deckless ark of primitive river days, 
borne with the downward current and out to the 
rolling drift of the mighty Mississippi. The boy 
knew nothing of navigation. He knew nothing of 
the lower Mississippi. But he did know honor to 
the core. And Gentry would send none other. 
With one companion the voyage was successfully 
made. And at its end ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
filled with the toil and poverty, but splendid free- 


6 


dom of his own life, had been brought face to face 
with human slavery, and the hopeless bondage of 
others. 

The years took him now into young manhood’s 
estate; the family had again set their faces to 
the West, and moved from the forests of Indiana 
to the broad prairies of Illinois. Here the hard 
and bitter struggle went on. Here the character 
was builded, chiseled in stone rough to look upon, 
but destined to stand fast upon the everlasting 
rock of justice and righteousness against the fury 
of all the storms of earth upon it. 

There was a country store and Lincoln kept it; 
law books and he mastered them, and joined the 
circuit riders of the Bar; men destined to fame in 
the Republic, John Calhoun, Edward D. Baker, 
Lyman Trumbull, John J. Hardin, John A. Logan, 
McClernard and Stephen A. Douglass; he be¬ 
came a soldier of the Black Hawk War; in 1832 
was defeated for the Legislature; in 1834 was 
elected; and again in 1837; both times as a Whig. 
I11 this last Session, when to do it was a bold and 
dangerous thing, he, with magnificent courage, 
dealt his first blow in that cause with which his 
destiny had been so strangely linked. 

Here it is: 

March 3, 1837. 

“Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slav¬ 
ery having passed both branches of the General 
Assembly at its present session, the undersigned 
hereby protest against the passage of the same. 

“They believe that the institution of slavery is 
founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that 
the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends 
rather to increase than abate its evils. 

“They believe that the Congress of the United 
States has no power under the Constitution to in¬ 
terfere with the institution of slavery in the dif¬ 
ferent States. 

“They believe that the Congress of the United 
States has the power, under the Constitution, to 
abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but 
that the power ought not to be exercised, unless 
at the request of the people of the District. 

“The difference between these opinions and 
those contained in the above resolutions is their 
reason for entering this protest. 

(Signed). 

“DAN STONE, 

“A. LINCOLN, 

“Representatives from the County of Sangamon.” 


7 


For this he became known as the Sangamon 
Chief; banqueted there and given these toasts 
which have survived from those distant days: 

“Abraham Lincoln : he has fulfilled the expec¬ 
tations of his friends and disappointed the hopes 
of his enemies.” 

“A. Lincoln: one of nature's noblemen.” 

These, now, were the days when discussion and 
event were hurrying on all over the land to the 
night which should flame the sky with Civil War 
and fill the Republic with the tread of the feet of 
armed men. What metal was in the soul must 
ring false or true. 

During the Legislature of 1839 came a great de¬ 
bate. In the one camp was Douglass. In the oth¬ 
er was Lincoln. To the latter was flung the 
taunt that his cause was hopeless and his numbers 
few. The flint struck deep and out flashed one of 
those living sparks filled with the fire of the heart 
of the man. Lincoln rose and said : 

“Address that argument to cowards and knaves. 
With the free and the brave it will affect nothing. 
It may be true; if it must, let it. Many free 
countries have lost their liberty, and ours may 
lose hers; but, if she shall, let it be my proudest 
plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that 
I never deserted her.” 

Here again spoke honor. Here again was the 
lion-like courage. Here the words of the states¬ 
man farseeing, and of the man. Here once more 
the strong, the pure, the simple and the beautiful 
diction of the orator matchless. Here again the 
ringing call of the silver trumpet challenging de¬ 
fiance to the walls of the citadel of error and 
wrong. 

In the year 1840 ocurred two incidents in Lin¬ 
coln's home town of Springfield, which were of 
lasting effect upon his character and career. With 
the happenings of these he stepped forever from 
the local stage and into that national arena, which 
was to mean for him fame everlasting. The State 
Auditor of Illinois was James Shields, able, im¬ 
petuous, hot headed, a democrat and a political 
opponent of the rail splitter. Lincoln wrote and 
had printed in the Sangamon Journal, a letter 
whose pretended author was a widow. Therein 
she bewailed hard times and democratic rule. And 
therein directed keen and satirical illusions to 
Shields. This politician who boasted with his 
other qualities a very sensitive disposition, raged 
through the town to discover the author. There¬ 
upon another letter appeared from the widow of¬ 
fering to assuage Mr. Shields by marrying him. 


8 


These productions were the talk of that section 
of the State. Shields demanded of the editor the 
name of the author. Lincoln sent word that he 
was responsible. Shields promptly challenged to 
a duel, the challenge was accepted and the tall rail 
splitter chose as weapons, ‘‘Cavalry broad-swords 
of the largest size.” Needless to say the duel 
never came off. Shields left uncontested such a 
field with such an opponent with such a weapon 
in hands and arms that had for years swung the 
axe and the maul in the wilderness. Lincoln ex¬ 
plained to him that the letters were intended as 
political, and not personal. And the incident 
closed. But the man of a nation’s life has learned 
a lesson he never forgot. With characteristic 
modesty and frankness he owned the mistake. 
Of useless personal bickering and contention and 
quarrel he afterwards said : 

“Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make 
the most of himself can spare the time for per¬ 
sonal contention. Still less can he afford to take 
all the consequences, including the vitiating of his 
temper and the loss of self control. Yield larger 
things to which you can show no more than equal 
right; and yield lesser ones though clearly your 
own. Better give your path to a dog than he hit- 
ten by him in contesting for the right. Even 
killing the dog would not cure the bite.” 

The other incident was his marriage to Miss 
Todd, which took place on the 4th day of Nov¬ 
ember, 1840, and it gave to him a wife to whom 
he was devoted from that day to the end of his 
earthly journey. It is of interest to note here an 
extract from one of his letters in which he says 
that their living expenses were then “only four 
dollars a week for board and lodging.” 

Here again shines the utter simplicity and hon¬ 
esty of this man’s life. Content with his help¬ 
mate to begin where they could. Content that 
their income should never be outlived no matter 
how meagre, no matter how small, no matter what 
sacrifice to keep within its limit. 

And now the Republic was to begin to know 
what manner of man this was. The next period of 
Lincoln’s life was crowded to the brim. In the 
victorious Harrison Log Cabin and Hard Cider 
campaign of 1840 he took the National stump for 
his party. 

The Thirtieth Congress saw him representing 
his old Sangamon district already made famous 
by Douglass and Baker. His one speech there re¬ 
viewing the Mexican War and attacking the ad¬ 
ministration of Polk was by common consent a 


9 


masterpiece. High praise indeed. For in that 
Congress in the Senate were Douglass and Davis 
and Benton and Calhoun and Dix and Cass and 
Webster; and in the house were Robert C. Win- 
throp, that knight errant with flashing blade from 
the. old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Andrew 
Johnson and John G. Palfrey and Caleb B. Smith 
and ex-President John Quincy Adams, while from 
the south had come Robert Toombs and Howell 
Cobb and Alexander H. Stevens. Mark the trib¬ 
ute of Stevens to this then unknown one of the 
West: 

“He always attracted and riveted the attention 
of the House when he spoke. His manner of 
speech, as well as thought, was original. He had 
no model. He was a man of strong convictions 
and what Carlisle would have called an earnest 
man. He abounded in anecdote. He illustrated 
everything he was talking about with an anec¬ 
dote, always exceedingly apt and pointed; and 
socially he always kept his company in a roar of 
laughter.” 

Close upon this came “The Old Rough and 
Ready” campaign resulting in the election of 
General Taylor and remarkable for its showing of 
how political parties were disintegrating and new 
lines slowly but surely forming for the great 
struggle that was in the air. With the Whigs 
were joined the Barn Burners, the Native Ameri¬ 
cans, Tyler’s men, office-seeking Loco Focos, and, 
as Lincoln so characteristically put it, “all the 
odds and ends and the Lord knows what.” 

Meantime in Buffalo was born that party whose 
battle cry was “Free Soil, Free Labor and Free 
Speech;” they nominated Martin Van Buren and 
the Democracy nominated Lewis Carr. William 
H. Seward in supporting Taylor said. “Freedom 
and Slavery are two antagonistic elements of 
society in America.” 

Lincoln said, “I am a northern man, or rather a 
western Free State man, with a constituency I be¬ 
lieve to be, and with personal feeling I know to be 
against the extension of Slavery.” And so the 
storm gathered and discussion and many tongued 
rumor foreran. And 1 'exas and Kansas and Ne¬ 
braska were dealt with. And the line was drawn. 
East and West it ran. And across it and back and 
across again went the man whose color was black; 
whose status was now slave and now free and 
whom then the Supreme Court of the United 
States named and defined as human chattel. 

On the 8th day of May. 1854, was finally passed 
through Congress the hill of Steven A. Douglass, 


10 


Senator from Illinois, organizing the two territor¬ 
ies of Kansas and Nebraska and leaving the 
question of Slavery to their settlers. There was a 
boom of artillery on Capitol Hill in Washington. 
And a burst of answering flame from the whole 
North. Hence arose the “Squatter Sovereignty” 
cry of Douglass and his supporters. And the an¬ 
swering shout of defiance of “Popular Sover¬ 
eignty” of all who opposed. Into the debatable 
territory rushed settlers from the North and South 
with arms in their hands. And here the first 
blood of the struggle was shed. Douglass came 
home to Illinois astounded at the burst of wrath 
that was upon him. In Chicago where he first 
essayed he was not permitted to speak, but in 
Springfield in October came the great State Fair. 
And there he declared he would speak and would 
be heard. And there Lincoln was chosen to re¬ 
ply. Never was the Senator from Illinois more 
subtle, more crafty, more filled with guile of polit¬ 
ical expedient than on that historic day and in that 
historic speech. And never was such craft and 
such guile so answered, so revealed, so stripped 
of every shred of the garment of its hypocrisy, so 
crushed by the power of logic, so overwhelmed by 
tremendous array of fact and argument, so stung 
to its death by the merciless steel of truth and 
so rent and torn and dismembered by the aroused 
lion that was upon it, as in the masterful speech 
of Abraham Lincoln in answer. In one trenchent, 
cutting and terrible sentence that was never there¬ 
after to go out from the memory of men, he de¬ 
stroyed the speech of Douglass. 

“I admit that the emigrant to Kansas and Ne¬ 
braska is competent to govern himself; but I deny 
his right to govern any other person without that 
person's consent.” 

But one thing could come from such a speech 
and such an answer in such a country and in such 
an era of its history. And that came quickly. In 
Bloomington. Illinois, May 29th, 1856, was organ¬ 
ized a party in that State, whose corner stone 
Lincoln was appealed to for and which took the 
one he gave, when he said: 

“Let us in building our new party make our 
corner stone the Declaration of Independence; let 
us build on this rock and the gates of Hell shall 
not prevail against 11s.” 

They called its name Republican, and dedicated 
it for freedom. Tts first Presidential nominee, 
Freemont, the Pathfinder, w r as defeated. Then 
came the canvass for the United States Senator- 


L. of C. 


11 


ship of Illinois. And those wonderful debates 
between Lincoln and Douglass, which for sur¬ 
passing power and masterful logic and pathos and 
the education of a whole people in those political 
principles which are founded deep in the immuta¬ 
ble and everlasting laws of the righteousness of 
God, have never been equalled since the world be¬ 
gan. The times were ripe, the men were ready, 
and the eyes of the world were beginning to turn 
toward that stage whereon the great drama was to 
be played. Nothing was lacking to make the oc¬ 
casion great and in nothing did it lack of great¬ 
ness. If Lincoln’s career had ended with the Sen¬ 
atorial election in that State, which defeated him, 
none the less would he have come out of these 
debates with a fame not soon to vanish from the 
minds of men. But it was not so ordained. Fate 
bore on until he was known as a candidate for 
the nomination by the Republican party for the 
Presidency of the United States. Early in i860 
Lincoln was invited to speak in New York at 
Cooper Union. His friends dreaded the test. 
Flow would the back-woodsman fare with an 
eastern audience of culture, of thought, of brains, 
and of the best that the civilization of that day 
could afford. But out of it came Lincoln splen¬ 
didly triumphant. Disdaining, as usual, any of 
the tricks of oratory, in a speech simple, yet 
scholarly and skillfully formed, with fresh and 
vigorous illustration drawn direct from that Na¬ 
ture with which for so many years he had com¬ 
muned, he appealed direct to the human heart of 
the East and found the same quick and ready re¬ 
sponse as from the human heart of the West. In 
one of the strongholds itself of the refinement of 
the seaboard he had won a famous victory. And 
this was the way he closed that speech : 

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by 
false accusations against us, nor frightened from 
it by menaces of destruction to the government. 
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in 
that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty 
as we understand it.” 

Once more the lifting of the trumpet against the 
walls of wrong. Once more the clear and ring¬ 
ing blast of defiance. Once more the courage. 
And, now, too, we have the outward manifesta¬ 
tion of the characteristic of the man so wonder¬ 
ful among all the things that went to his make 
up; that far seeing, that mystic, that prophetic 
vision which from this period of his career to the 
very end so filled his every thought and every 
speech and every utterance. Until his countrv- 


12 



men came to look upon him with a reverence clue 
the prophet and seer. And here too was another 
of the master springs of his character. Faith in 
God, faith in humanity, faith in the right that 
having done all, stands. 

And so it came that on that June day by the 
fiee lolling waters of Michigan this man was 
bidden by his party to stand for the Presidency of 
the Union. 

1 here amid the booming of batteries of cannon 
the son of 1 homas Lincoln, the hack-woodsman, 
“stepped out upon the mighty stage on which was 
to be enacted one of the most tremendous trage¬ 
dies the world has ever seen.” 

Down in Springfield town he quietly had the 
news and then went to his home saying, “there 
is a little woman on Eighth street who would like 
to hear about this.” 

Much of the time of this address has been de¬ 
voted to the days that budded the character of 
Lincoln, because in these days it has seemed to 
your speaker were the well springs themselves 
from which we might this evening draw those 
many urns of inspiration. 

I he dreadful years that were now upon this 
man and which were to bow that tall, ungainly 
form, and seam that sorrowing face with those far 
away and pitying eyes, with the woe and terror 
and death struggle of a nation, were years indeed 
of his rich fruition. And yet it was hut the rip¬ 
ening and full shaping of that which was already 
upon the branch when his first presidential term 
began. Nor is there any need to dwell long be¬ 
fore an American audience upon the exceeding 
bitterness of those dark and bloody and dreadful 
times. The central figure of it all had said good¬ 
bye forever to his friends in the Illinois town that 
had known so much of his poverty and his dis¬ 
tress. They should never see him alive again. 
Nor ever again indeed, his face or form, until 
shrouded there in the nation’s woe and ready for 
the sepulchre. On the steps at the Capitol in 
Washington he made to his countrymen and to 
the world that exquisite, that pathetic, that heart 
stirring plea for the Union of the land he loved. 
And again he wrote his own superb character in 
these words, to die no more: 

“I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but 
friends. We must not be enemies. Though pas¬ 
sion may have strained, it must not break our 
bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory 
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave 


13 


to every living heart and hearthstone all over this 
broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, 
when again touched, as surely they will be, by the 
better angels of our nature.” 

The first inaugural address was ended. Lincoln 
turned to the man standing by his side, who had 
held his hat through that magnificent plea and his 
eyes met the eyes and his hand grasped the hand 
of Steven A. Douglass, the little giant of Illinois. 
At last at one with his great political rival, this 
man, himself little less wonderful than Lincoln, 
turned his face to the West and preached with 
all his fire and fervor and splendid magnetism the 
gospel of the Union that must and should be 
preserved. It was the last up-blaze of a brilliant 
torch, for, in June the summons came and Doug¬ 
lass went to his long sleep. 

And what faced that other there at Washing¬ 
ton. The Treasury looted. The Navy scattered. 
The army small and disorganized. Officers in 
both branches of the service violating their oaths 
and swearing allegiance to the South; States in 
secession and more going. Senators and Repre¬ 
sentatives abandoning the Capitol and hurrying to 
the forming of a new government which should 
tear stars from the flag and take out from among 
its stripes. The South united and some of the 
North divided. Washington defenceless and 
threatened. Then came the shot at Sumpter. The 
flames of it burst across the sky and the hounds 
of war were slipped at last from their leash. 

Out there in far Wisconsin men who had 
borne the Wide Awake torch that night took the 
musket of the Iron brigade with their war eagle, 
Old Abe, and faced to the front; and with them 
sprang from every village and city and hamlet a 
host of armed men to see that the Union of Web¬ 
ster and the fathers be kept forever one and in¬ 
dissoluble. And Lincoln sent the call. And how 
the leaders rose. In Indiana, Morton; in Ohio, 
Dennison; in Pennsylvania, Curtin; in New York, 
Morgan; in Connecticut, Buckingham; in Mas¬ 
sachusetts, Andrews; through all the north land 
men set their faces toward their leader with 
another and a new song. “We are coming Father 
Abraham, 300,000 strong.” 

Dreadful as an army with banners they stream¬ 
ed to him and for four such years as the world 
had never looked upon their lives went out in 
prison pen, in Southern swamp, and on far away 
battlefield, till the whole land became a sepulchre 
of brave men. Down there in the peninsular with 


14 


McClellan, up here on the banks of the Potomac 
at Antietam; now along the death strewn sides 
of Fredericksburg; now in the West at Shiloh and 
Vicksburg; out there with the hearts of oak of 
Farragut in the Bay of Mobile or passing the hell 
of Forts Jackson and St. Philip; now with 
Thomas, the magnificent, at Nashville; or with 
Rosencranz at dreadful Chickamauga, until when 
it seemed the Nation could bear no more came 
the death grapple over the slopes and hills of 
Gettysburg; the plunge with Grant into the burn¬ 
ing fires and tangle of the Wilderness; the des¬ 
perate throttle began at the bloody angle of Spots- 
sylvania; Sheridan scourging the Shenandoah, a 
very god of war; Sherman loosed from all the 
world and swinging down from Atlanta to the 
sea; and then Cold Harbor and Petersburg and 
the last stand of the tattered ranks of gray, those 
fighters of the lost cause, whose splendid courage 
has always challenged the admiration of the army 
of the blue; and then Appomatox and the famous 
appletree. And what of Lincoln. What of that 
man upon whom all this had been laid. Ah, the 
infinite sorrow and patience and tenderness and 
pathos of him who bore our griefs. No soldier 
boy of the Union, wearied to his sleep on post 
that would not be denied, but could look to Father 
Abraham, amid all the anguish of those days and 
months and years, and pray for the mercy that 
was sure to come. 

“We have had blood enough/’ he said, “the land 
is filled with it; you shall not shoot one of my 
boys.’* 

And when the end of it all came, what, again, 
of Lincoln. What of him upon whom the whole 
world had looked for those years. Down there in 
the smoking ruins of the rebel Capitol he walked 
alone with his boy. And upon his skirts pressed, 
and at his feet kneeled down the dusky people 
he had freed. 

And now what for him was there to be? Rest 
and peace? Yea, rest and peace that passeth un¬ 
derstanding. For scarce had he turned to his 
countrymen with these immortal words upon his 
lips of that second and last inaugural, “With mal¬ 
ice towards none and with charity towards all,” 
than the assassin’s bullet did its work. And Lin¬ 
coln was dead. After service so valiant and true 
on many a fierce and rugged field this great brand 
Excalibur at last had come at nightfall to the 
shores of that boundless and eternal sea. And 
there strongly wheele_d it was and thrown. 


15 


“The great brand made lightnings in the splendor 
of the moon, 

And flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an 
arch, 

Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, 

Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 
By night, with noises of the northern sea; 

So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur: 

But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm 
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, 

And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him 
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.” 

And so passed our Lincoln into the sure keep¬ 
ing of those that die no more. 

“He has gone,” says Stanton, “he belongs now 
to the great of all time.” 

Gone but ever with us. No longer of this 
earth, but there among the stars of America’s 
noblest and best to shine with splendor and never 

failing light. 

And if the eye of our citizenship grow dim let 
it here renew its youth, kindled and undazzled at 
the very sun itself of this man’s career. 

In no fitter words can the study of this Ameri¬ 
can be ended to-night than in that Battle Hymn 
of the Republic which was ever his favorite and 
whose measures, stately, grand, beautiful, tender 
and prophetic are themselves so full of the life 
he led and the death he died: 

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of 
the Lord, 

He is trampling out the vintage where his grapes 
of wrath are stored. 

He hath loosed the fearful lightnings of his terri¬ 
ble quick sword, 

His truth is marching on. 

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred 
circling camps, 

They have builded him an altar by the evening- 
dews and damps, 

I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and 
flaring lamps, 

His truth is marching on. 

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows 
of steel, 

As ye deal with my contemnors so with you my 
grace shall deal, 

Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent 
with his heel, 

Our God is marching on. 

He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall 
never call retreat, 

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his 
judgment seat, 

Oh be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant 
my feet, 

For God is marching on. 

In the beauty of the lillies Christ was born across 
the sea, 

With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you 
and me, 

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make 
men free, 

For God is marching on.” 


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